Inside Canada's Vibrant Rio Olympic House By Yabu Pushelberg

After being a prominent Canadian symbol in the U.K. for more than 50 years, even hosting the Queen and Prince Philip for dinner, Canada’s diplomatic mansion Macdonald House on Grosvenor Square has been sold to an Indian real estate developer for more than $500-million. Canada was founded on European culture and was defined by it. Out of European settlement arose a domestic host society that came to be know as Canada and its people called Canadians; a separate identity from Europe while retaining some commonalities.

Both my sister and I live om Toronto 500 km from my father’s home but we were trying to sell his house of which the other executor, who lives in the next town, decided to move in and throw out the tenant living there (who was paying rent to cover the cost of mortgage and insurrance).

This means that you do not have to sell the house if there is enough money to pay expenses and taxes without selling it. In the meantime, the title to the house will either sit in the name of the estate for a while or will be transferred into the names of the children.

As the chart—which is indexed to 1998, as far back as the Teranet-National Bank house price index goes—reveals, though U.S. housing prices have climbed back from the lows of the subprime mortgage crisis in some cities, only San Francisco, home to booming Silicon Valley, has kept pace with Toronto’s house prices—and no U.S. city comes close to Vancouver’s real estate craze.

But the structures had what builders call good bones, and the group, the San Juan Community HomeTrust, discovered that the cost of transporting them across the Haro Strait from Canada and restoring them here was comparable to the cost of building from scratch.